A Question of Values. What are yours?
A ship in harbour is safe. But that is not what ships are made for. John A Shed There are a billion stars in the sky and there are a billion values you can follow. But if you set sail in your life without deciding which key stars you will follow in the sky you may find yourself lost at sea, running into heavy weather or even aground on the rocks or reefs of hostile shores. Our stars are not astrology, but our core values which are there to guide us on our path through life. Your values are your base program against which you test environments and make the…
The Three Questions: How to Discover and Master the Power Within You
I didn’t get into this book as much as I did The Four Agreements, partly because some of it has been covered in that book (as well as others I have read from Don Miguel Ruiz including The Fifth Agreement and The Five Levels of Attachment) and maybe because I thought the narrator did not have the gravitas to make the book sound as authentic as the previous works I mentioned. However, once we get into the three questions themselves, the use of analogies to relate how our psyche interacts with the world and so illuminates the answers to the questions is very interesting. There were many insights within the…
How to Become Extraordinary by Design
I seem to be immersed in the Mindvalley approach to living at the moment. I am studying an old Extraordinary by Design course which, I think, was supplemental material from when I bought the Code of the Extraordinary Mind when it was first released. It has taken me some time to get around to it! The course is broken into 12 modules, each reflecting the 12 areas of life we should all seek to improve ourselves in, set goals in, and seek balance in. To live a fulfilling life we should seek to balance the 12 areas and, by doing so, often find more opportunities arise and more abundance manifests…
The Daly Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
This review has been a long time in the making! The Daily Stoic contains 366 days of quotes from the great Stoic philosophers and a short analysis of each of them. You can take each day as its printed and study the quote and take from it what you will. It’s easy to slot into your daily or morning routine as it takes about 5-10 minutes at most to read, review and apply the daily lesson. Some of the lessons may seem obvious, while some may be more profound. Even the books recommends you journal: At the end of each day, he would ask himself variations of the following questions:…
Man’s Search for Meaning
This is a book of two halves. The first part is an autobiographical account of Frankl’s experience in the concentration camps, weaving his psychotherapy insights and discoveries into the narrative. The second part of the book is a synopsis of logotherapy psychotherapy. Personally, I found the second half of the book somewhat dry and the periodic references to other works (including page numbers), while inarguably complete in terms of scientific papers, lost something in the narrative of an audiobook. Also, there is specialised (and long) terminology which might be better read so you have time to re-read the words and gain a fuller understanding. This is why I dropped a…
The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws
I first read The Code of the Extraordinary Mind when it was released in 2016 and have both the Kindle and Audible versions. One for reading on the go, and the other for more detailed study. After reading The Buddha and the Badass, I thought it was time to revisit the work and get to grips with the concepts in a more internalised way. One of the excellent ideas behind this book is the inclusion of an online experience which is much greater than your traditional book bonuses which many books now provide links to. Vishen and his Mindvalley team created an online set of materials at Mindvalley that support…
The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work
The Buddha and The Badass Audiobook Review Ken Wilber popularized the importance of worldviews in his work on integral theory. You can simplify his work and determine that most people will fall in one of the four following worldview categories. Depending on your worldviews certain aspects of this book will appeal to you and others might affront you. You could be a rationalist. In which case you’ll love the business ideas in this book but scoff when I speak of the magic of the mind, intuition, or listening to your soul. You could be a traditionalist. In which case you’ll love anything that reminds you of your spiritual beliefs but…
The Miracle Morning: 6 Habits to Elevate Yourself
This book was recommended to be by a coach as an approach that I might benefit from. I have never been a morning person and, in the restaurant business, am seldom up before 10AM at the best of times (often finishing work around 10PM to midnight). I was sceptical as I have heard of many ‘get up early, do great things because this works for other great people you might admire’ systems. However, I listened to it as I know every self-help or self-improvement book has something inside its covers that I can learn and apply. And if there is more than one (ideally at least three) then the time…
The 10 Human Drives
I have read a number of Brendon Burchard’s books (Motivation Manifesto, High Performance Habits and Life’s Golden Ticket), have taken his Transformation Week and am studying his Productivity Masterclass also. As many of you will know from the contents of this site, personal improvement is something I take seriously and am always ready to look at new and related materials. So, when an invite came into my inbox to look at unreleased footage of Brendon discussing the 10 Human Drives, I accepted. The course is delivered via growth.com using the Kajabi platform, but you cannot access it unless you’re part of Brendon’s HPX world in some form. You have to…
The Five Levels of Attachment
Five Levels of Attachment reminded me of a satirical piece I wrote in 2016 called Religion because the five levels of attachment range from being essentially detached at the first level through to fanatical attachment at the fifth level and I had also structured the 5 levels from essentially detached to fanatical from my own observation. However, Don Miguel Ruiz explains each level of attachment with clarity and examples we can relate to. This is no satire and contains valuable Toltec knowledge. The early part of the book is a recap of some key points from The Four Agreements and follow-up book, The Fifth Agreement and there is a good…
Helping you to find your way Whole
